JOOLA Becomes DUPR’s Official Ball — But This Deal Is About Much More Than Pickleballs

Another week, another partnership in pickleball. But this one deserves a little more attention from anyone working in the business of racket sports.

JOOLA has announced that its HC-40 will become the Official Ball of DUPR from 1 September 2026, as part of a multi-year agreement covering DUPR-sanctioned competition.

That means the HC-40 will be used across The Dink Minor League Pickleball (MiLP), DUPR's collegiate and high-school competitions, the College World Championship, The Nationals and the DUPR College Pickleball Tour. Importantly, the requirement also extends to third-party operators running DUPR-sanctioned events.

On one level, this is a straightforward commercial partnership between an equipment manufacturer and one of pickleball's most influential technology and competition platforms.

But we think there is a bigger industry story here.

As pickleball grows from a relatively fragmented participation sport into a more organised competitive ecosystem, standardisation is becoming increasingly valuable — and increasingly commercial.

The numbers make the partnership interesting

DUPR says it now has more than two million registered users across 183 countries and expects to support 350 events during 2026.

Put those figures alongside the wider growth of pickleball and the scale of the opportunity becomes clearer.

According to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association's latest research, 24.3 million Americans played pickleball in 2025, compared with just 4.2 million in 2020. That represents more than a fivefold increase in five years, while pickleball has now been the fastest-growing sport tracked by SFIA for five consecutive years.

Perhaps even more important for the industry is what is happening beneath the headline participation number.

SFIA reports that the number of CORE pickleball participants — people playing at least eight times per year — increased from 1.4 million in 2020 to 7.5 million in 2025. Meanwhile, players aged 13–24 now record the highest participation rate of any age segment.

That matters enormously.

A sport doesn't build a sustainable equipment, facility and competition economy simply by attracting people who try it once. It needs frequent players who buy equipment, enter competitions, book courts, take coaching and care about their rating.

And pickleball is rapidly creating exactly that audience.

Why does the ball matter to a rating company?

This is where the JOOLA-DUPR partnership becomes more interesting than the usual "Official X of Y" sponsorship announcement.

DUPR is fundamentally trying to answer one question: how good is this player?

Its ratings analyse match results to place players on a scale ranging from 2.000 to 8.000, with the wider ambition of allowing players of different ages, genders and locations to be compared through a common rating system.

The more seriously players, clubs and tournament organisers take those ratings, the more important the competitive environment becomes.

The ball is part of that environment.

Richard Lee, President and CEO of JOOLA, describes the logic neatly:

There is inevitably marketing language involved here, but the underlying argument is worth considering.

Anyone who has played enough pickleball knows that balls can behave differently. Flight, hardness, bounce, durability, temperature and wind conditions can all influence how a match feels.

There is even academic research beginning to examine pickleball ball aerodynamics and how variables such as wind affect trajectory and playing strategy, illustrating that the apparently humble plastic ball has a meaningful influence on the way the sport is played.

So if DUPR wants its ratings to become a trusted competitive benchmark, reducing unnecessary variables within its own competitions makes sense.

As DUPR CEO Tito Machado puts it:

Standardisation is what growing sports eventually do

There is also a broader lesson here for pickleball.

Young sports tend to be fragmented. Different venues use different equipment, tournament formats vary, player levels are described differently and local ecosystems develop their own conventions.

That flexibility can actually help a sport grow initially because there are fewer barriers to participation.

But as competition becomes more serious, the pressure for common standards increases.

Tennis has spent decades creating this infrastructure around court dimensions, ball specifications, rankings, tournament categories and equipment regulations.

Pickleball is attempting to build much of that infrastructure while participation is exploding around it.

And that creates business opportunities.

DUPR is effectively becoming part of the digital infrastructure of competitive pickleball. Its rating is already used across organisations including USA Pickleball, the PPA, Major League Pickleball, Life Time and The Picklr, among others.

If that infrastructure continues to expand, then being embedded within it becomes commercially valuable.

Which is why this deal matters to JOOLA.

For JOOLA, this is distribution disguised as sponsorship

The most interesting commercial element may be the requirement for third-party operators hosting DUPR-sanctioned events to use the HC-40.

That's a powerful mechanism.

Rather than simply putting the JOOLA logo on tournament signage, the partnership puts the company's product into players' hands.

Tournament organisers need inventory. Players practise with the ball they expect to encounter in competition. Clubs begin stocking it. Coaches introduce it into sessions. Retailers respond to demand.

Official-ball agreements can therefore create something much more valuable than brand awareness: habit.

And in consumable categories such as balls, habit matters.

For JOOLA, the potential prize is not simply selling balls to 350 DUPR events. It is using DUPR's competitive ecosystem to encourage thousands of players to regard the HC-40 as a familiar competitive standard.

That is a considerably more interesting proposition.

But players won't necessarily accept a standard just because an organisation chooses it

There is another side to this story, and it shouldn't be ignored.

The pickleball community has strong opinions about balls.

Following the announcement, discussion among players on Reddit included plenty of scepticism about the significance of an "Official Ball of DUPR", while others questioned how the requirement would work at local events or pointed to their preference for competing products already established within their playing communities.

That reaction is useful for anyone working in the industry.

Commercial standardisation and player standardisation are not necessarily the same thing.

An organisation can mandate a ball within its tournaments, but becoming the ball players voluntarily put into their bags for Tuesday night's club session is another challenge entirely.

The brands that ultimately dominate this category will therefore need both institutional adoption and grassroots acceptance.

JOOLA has just made a significant move on the first.

Now it needs to earn the second.

The bigger Racket Business takeaway

We think the most important part of this announcement isn't actually the HC-40.

It's the increasing value of the ecosystems being built around racket sports.

For brands, the traditional sponsorship model has largely been about buying visibility: logos on courts, athletes wearing clothing and banners around venues.

The next generation of partnerships can go much deeper.

Equipment companies can become embedded within competition formats. Rating platforms can influence how players find matches. Booking technology can determine where players play. Coaching platforms can influence how they learn. Clubs can control increasingly valuable communities of highly engaged participants.

In other words, the most powerful partnerships may increasingly be those that sit inside the player's behaviour rather than simply in front of the player's eyes.

JOOLA already has considerable visibility in pickleball. DUPR has something different: millions of player profiles, a growing tournament network and a rating that players increasingly have a reason to care about.

Bringing those two assets together makes commercial sense.

And with US pickleball participation rising from 4.2 million to 24.3 million in just five years, we suspect this won't be the last major equipment brand looking for ways to become embedded in the infrastructure surrounding the sport.

For clubs, tournament operators and other racket-sports businesses, that is perhaps the useful lesson from this announcement: as participation scales, the platforms that organise players, competition and data become valuable commercial assets in their own right.

The battle in pickleball is no longer simply about who makes the best paddle or ball.

Increasingly, it is about who owns — or becomes indispensable to — the ecosystem in which those products are used.